Most people spend more time working than doing anything else, including sleeping or even hanging out with family and friends, according to Laszlo Bock, head of People Operations at Google Inc., a department that handles over two million resumes a year. He wrote “Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google that Will Transform How You Live and Lead,” released by Hachette Book Group this month. “For too many people it’s just an unpleasant means to an end,” he says. That’s not the way work should be. “We want to make work suck less than it does today,” he adds.

Finding a great job at a tech company like Google
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— or anywhere else where you think you might be happy — is the tricky part. Bock has a checklist that every job seeker should go through before walking into an interview. Here are just a few: Anticipate the questions you will be asked and practice several alternative answers but not so much that they sound rehearsed (and remember to give examples), think about how you have positively impacted your team at your previous job rather than focusing on your individual accomplishments, and scan the room for clues about your interviewer and his or her state of mind.

But there is one quality often missing from the highest rated candidates, Bock says. Although it’s not always something that’s valued in corporate America, for interviewees the absence of this quality can be fatal. “From the outside, people may not find what I’m about to say credible,” he says. “There are lots of really smart people who look for jobs. It’s harder to find people who are clever and have some intellectual humility.” When given new information, employees who lack that quality are oftentimes not able or willing to adapt as readily. (As if to illustrate this point, the last review on his book jacket comes from his daughter Annabelle, 5. “It’s a boring book,” her comment reads.)

And humility works both ways: Bock is on the same page as Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook Inc.
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chief executive, when it comes to only hiring people he would work for.

Google stumbles in job search, too. In 2004, it ran a billboard in Cambridge, Mass., and off the 101 Freeway in California. It was a cryptic puzzle not unlike that used to recruit MI6 code-breakers in the movie “The Imitation Game.” In this case, the billboard puzzle led to a Web page with a second puzzle and, when that too was solved, it led to a Google Labs page requesting resumes. Instead of discovering the next Alan Turing, the man who broke the Nazi’s “enigma” code during World War II to help win the war, Google’s billboard approach produced zero new hires. Why? Bock says they needed people with broad skills who were also team players, not just puzzle-solvers.

Unlike the billboards, job ads should be forensically specific, and the job search should be part of every employee’s job. But assessment should be done by recruiters — not line managers — and to help avoid what Bock calls “confirmation bias” when a candidate is selected, he says subordinates and people from other departments should be included in the interview. And research shows that the optimal number of interviews is four. Backdoor references — people the candidate may have worked with — are also critical.

That said, one of Bock’s favorite pieces of advice for both employees and employers: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” At Google, software engineers gain access to almost all of the company’s code on their first day. “The downside risk is that someone could join, look at our code base and copy it and go to another company or take what they’ve seen or set up their own search engine,” he says. “But if you have access to that information, you feel trusted and behave in a more trusted way.” That kind of trust leads Google employees are referred to as “Googlers” in the same way that Disney has “cast members” instead of employees. “It’s a nice affectation,” he says.

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